Such incidents look as if trout were particular to a shade, but we can never be certain that the angler did not make an especially artful and delicate cast when he succeeded. Sir Herbert Maxwell intends to make the experiment of using duns of impossible and unnatural colours; if he succeeds with these, on several occasions, as well as with orthodox flies, perhaps we may decide that trout do not distinguish hues. On a Sutherland loch, an angler found that trout would take flies of any colour, except that of a light-green leaf of a tree. This rejection decidedly looked as if even Sutherland loch trout exercised some discrimination. Often, on a loch, out of three flies they will favour one, and that, perhaps, not the trail fly. The best rule is: when you find a favourite fly on a salmon river, use it: its special favouritism may be a superstition, but, at all events, salmon do take it. We cannot afford to be always making experiments, but Mr. Herbert Spencer, busking his flies the reverse way, used certainly to be at least as successful with sea trout as his less speculative neighbours in Argyllshire. In making rods, Walton is most concerned with painting them; 'I think a good top is worth preserving, or I had not taken care to keep a top above twenty years.' Cotton prefers rods 'made in Yorkshire,' having advanced from the home-made stage. His were spliced, and kept up all through the season, as he had his water at his own door, while Walton trudged to the Lee and other streams near London, when he was not fishing the Itchen, or Shawford Brook. _The Angler's Vade Mecum_ recommends eighteen-feet rods: preferring a fir butt, fashioned by the arrow-maker, a hazel top, and a tip of whalebone. This authority, even more than Walton, deals in mysterious 'Oyntments' of gum ivy, horse-leek, asafoetida, man's fat, cat's fat, powdered skulls, and grave earth. A ghoulish body is the angler of the _Vade Mecum_. He recommends up-stream fishing, with worm, in a clear water, and so is a predecessor of Mr. Stewart. 'When you have hooked a good fish, have an especial care to keep the rod bent, lest he run to the end of the line' (he means, as does Walton, lest he pull the rod horizontal) 'and break either hook or hold.' An old owner of my copy adds, in manuscript, 'And hale him not to near ye top of the water, lest in flaskering he break ye line.'